“You don’t get it, do you? You just don’t get it.” He circled around her. He didn’t trust himself to be anywhere within arm’s reach of her. “You might be able to live with the choices you’ve made, all from the best possible motives, all strung together with impeccable logic. But I can’t.”

“I still did it for you.”

“I know that. I know you paid some anonymous people to fabricate Container Zero, then fed them into the incinerator. I know you encouraged the Prophet of the New Machine Jihad to believe he could free his god while all along you were planning to blow him up with his own bomb. I know you used Maddy’s priest to poison our marriage and try and make us hate each other. I know you sent Iguro to try and clean up the mess you made, and now he’s lying in a fridge somewhere. I know you did all that for me. I know Tina and Tabletop and Lucy are just inconveniences and you’d have to get rid of them, too. I know you’d have left Michael to wonder forever why no one was coming to find him.”

“That’s what I did. That’s what I’d do. That’s the cost of your life.”

“But it’s not you paying, is it? It’s always everyone else, and I don’t think it’s fair.” He laughed, harsh and abrupt. “Look at me. I’ve got morals all of a sudden. Yeah, well, let’s run with this. It’s not fair that you used people without their permission. You should always give them a chance to say no.”

“But what are they there for, otherwise? We’re more important than they are. We actually give their lives meaning. You think a soldier is more important than the general? A salaryman more important than the CEO? They’re nothing, and they know it. They wait for leaders like you and me to use them, and they’re glad when that happens. You’ve done it yourself: you got Michael to make the EDF believe they were getting their orders from Brussels, when they were getting them from you. You used them and you didn’t ask their permission. They were there, and you needed them.” She saw she’d scored a hit by the sour look on Petrovitch’s face. “Morals are nice, but people like us have to forget about them sometimes. We see the bigger picture, we see what needs to be done.”

“Okay.” He held up his hand. “Bang to rights. That’s exactly what I did. I thought that was what I had to do to break the Outies, and for the best of reasons, too: I wanted to find Maddy. Hers was the life I had to save, and the rest of them could go to hell. I behaved just like you’ve done.”

“Maybe then,” said Sonja quietly, “we can work something out.”

“One problem.” He still had his hand up, and he swapped his open palm for a rigid index finger. “Just one. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have taken away someone’s right to decide whether they fight or run, or to work out for themselves whose side they really want to be on. It was a mistake, and I won’t make it again.”

She was staring at him, incredulous.

“I’ve learned a better way of doing things,” he said. “I have friends now, and we do things for each other because we want to, and this is normal, you know? I have a wife, and yeah, things have been difficult between us for longer than they haven’t, but I know I’m supposed to do stuff for her because it’ll make her happy and not because I’ll get more sex, or I won’t have to go shopping with her, or whatever. And if I ask someone a favor, I hope they’ll say yes rather than no, but I won’t ruin their life if they refuse me, and I’ll only ask if it’s something I can’t do rather than something I think is beneath me or too dangerous. And in asking, I put myself in their debt, and they can call on that, and I should be grateful that they see me as reliable or competent enough to be able to help them. Chyort, I’ve changed so much, I can barely believe it.”

“You can’t mean any of that,” said Sonja. “Tell me none of that is true.”

“I can’t. That’s why I want nothing to do with this, or you. You’re not…” He felt he was ten again, and it made him squirm. “You’re not my friend anymore, because friends don’t do this to each other. They don’t take away each other’s dignity or freedom. They don’t connive with their enemies behind their backs, and they don’t lie to their faces. I understand all that now. I might not be very good at it, but I know what I should do.”

He was spent, but his own confession had surprised him. He almost felt good about himself.

Sonja reached down to her ankle and, with a rasp of Velcro, released the small pistol from its holster. She curled her finger over the trigger and pointed the barrel at Petrovitch.

He raised his eyebrows, but not his own automatic, which still pressed cold and hard against his skin. “So is this your answer? Kill me: after all that effort you went to, to save my life?”

She was breathing slow and deep. Her aim didn’t waver, and after a few moments of disquiet, Petrovitch found that he didn’t care.

“Meh,” he shrugged, “if I’m going to fail, I may as well fail spectacularly.”

He turned his back on her, and started to walk slowly toward the elevator. He hadn’t gone more than a couple of steps when he heard Sonja call his name. He looked over his shoulder just in time to see her take the gun in her mouth and blow the back of her head off.

He couldn’t unsee the act itself, but he did manage to look away while her body fell with a thump onto the carpet.

30

There was nothing he could do. Not now. Not for her. He didn’t need to go over and check: he’d shot enough people in the head to know she wasn’t getting up again. He stared at her for a long time, thinking through everything and what might have been.

It could have been so very different. He could have let Marchenkho kidnap her, and then Hijo wouldn’t have killed Old Man Oshicora, the New Machine Jihad would never have risen, and the Outies would never have broken through the cordon. Madeleine would have never broken her vows, Lucy’s parents would still be alive, and maybe, just maybe, Tabletop would be doing her backflips in a cheerleading squad rather than having herself turned into a weapon.

He and Pif would still have discovered their equations. The world would still have turned.

Instead, he had this. And even if it wasn’t his fault, it was his responsibility.

“I still don’t know why you were on your own that morning. Perhaps you’d secretly arranged to meet a girlfriend, or a boy, and you didn’t want your bodyguards hanging around. Or maybe you just wanted to slum it with the rest of us, see how the little people lived. Marchenkho was waiting, had always been waiting. And there, right there on the curbside, I was given a chance to redeem myself. I didn’t think about where it would lead.” He sighed and took the weight of his left arm in his right hand. “But neither did you, and what I did was right, and I’m not sorry.”

After that, it was just a question of riding back down to the ground floor. Thirty seconds, almost like falling, not quite like flying. As the elevator slowed, the sensation was lost. The world returned in all its terrifying, dazzling complexity.

The doors opened. A sea of silent people faced him. He stepped out across the threshold and saw their expressions suspended somewhere between hope and despair. Such was the weight of unrealistic expectation. Petrovitch was momentarily at a loss for words.

“Yeah. That didn’t go well,” he said, pressing his finger against the bridge of his nose. “I could give you all the details, and I will, just as soon as I can make sense of it myself. You’ve been working for the Freezone, and I want you to keep doing that. Your wages will be paid, all contracts honored. If you don’t think you know what it is you’re supposed to be doing anymore, then tell me and I’ll find something. It’s not like we’re running out of jobs to do.”